About Me...

I'm a front-end developer who is passionate about Javascript, building great user experiences, fighting for simplicity over complexity, constantly learning and someone who strives to mentor and share with other developers around me (so, hopefully, they'll mentor and share with me).

I've worked for both large and small companies. Both on-site and remote. And for the last handful of jobs have been a primary Team or Technical Lead.

Technical Interests & Focus

I've had 18+ years experience as a developer, starting out as a C/Unix systems programmer and began designing/developing web sites back in 1996. Since then, I've gone through the phases of being a full-stack developer (weren't we all back then) to focusing on the client-side and front-end.

"If you don’t actively fight for simplicity in software, complexity will win.

…and it will suck."

~ Henrik Jorteg

My interests primarily lie in design and implementation of native web apps, whether desktop or mobile, single-page applications or otherwise. Although I primarily focus on Javascript (ES5/6, node & browser), HTML/5 and CSS; I have plenty of experience writing PHP, Perl and other languages.

I've developed with a number of frameworks, such as AngularJS, FlightJS, ExtJS, JQuery along with some ReactJS and its virtual-dom relatives. I enjoy learning new frameworks, libraries and programming philosophies. I strive for simplicity, favor composition, strongly work towards a reactive and functional style of development versus object-oriented and imperative

“The problem with object-oriented languages is they’ve got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle.” ~ Joe Armstrong

Non-Technical Interests

Outside of learning about the web, I have a number of other interests as well (are you surprised?). I dabble in playing guitar, chess and legos. I also occasionally fall back to my original love focus in college which is art, drawing and painting (even digital painting in Photoshop). I also enjoy hanging out with my best friend and wife, talking, watching our fav tv-shows and just connecting.

BPSA

I am also the Chief Commissioner and Board President for the Baden Powell Service Association, an inclusive, traditional scouting organization for youth and adults. I've been involved and on the board since 2008.

American Sign Language

I have five, wonderful children, two of which are special needs. My youngest is partially deaf and so we both speak and use American Sign Language with her. I've enjoyed learning sign so much, I helped start and co-run an ASL meetup in my area and am constantly learning and finding ways to interact and work with the Deaf community.

My Tools & Workflow

Don't ask me about Sublime or Atom. My IDE is vim. I've got a number of standard things setup, which you can check out on my github page if you're interested. Outside of vim, my standard workflow tools consist of git, Grunt/Gulp, npm, Browserify and Jasmine. Travis CI and SauceLabs are amazingly helpful tools as well.

I use a Mac Book Pro and spend a lot of time in the Chrome dev tools debugger. I'm constantly reading and learning web technologies and approaches; but the best way to learn is by doing and repeating and then teaching - which is partly why I started this blog.

Contact me

You can checkout my resume on stack-exchange for more details. You'll also find me @tuxz0r on twitter.